After weeks of sleepless nights and endless website testing, the TPOTY team can sit back and relax a little today, as the 2013 awards are now open for entry. You have until October 1st to submit your images or short film to us, and we can’t wait to see how you interpret the category briefs this year.

The prizes are as great as ever – this year’s Cutty Sark Award for the overall winner combines £5,000 in cash with a covetable whisky collection and a unique, personalised surfboard! Across various categories you’ll find a fantastic range of Fujifilm cameras to be won, including the X-Pro1, X100S, X20, HS50EXR and XP60, and we’d like to welcome two new travel sponsors this year: cazenove + loyd is offering an Inspired Journey in Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains and the walled city of Marrakech to the winner of the One Shot category – theme ‘Extraordinary’. And the winner of Monochromal, our first-ever black & white image portfolio category, will go to ‘Ansel Adams country’ – the Northern California Triangle – with a trip organised by the Yosemite/Mariposa Co. Tourism Bureau.

If you’re a young photographer, check out the Young TPOTY prizes this year – and start thinking about how you’ll capture this Crowded Planet in images.

2013 is TPOTY’s 10th birthday, and we’ll have some surprises in store for you this year, so watch this space for news in the coming weeks! But in the meantime, check out the categories and prizes for TPOTY 2013 and start planning your entry!

We’re definitely feeling in a celebratory mood here at TPOTY Towers, with the 2013 awards due to be launched tomorrow. To mark the occasion, we have a Festival fun pack of goodies from Cutty Sark for one lucky reader to win.

The prize consists of a folding camping chair – just the thing for sitting on while you wait for the perfect sunrise to photograph – a hoodie and a beanie hat to keep you toasty if that sunrise isn’t as warming as you’d expected – plus some other Cutty Sark bits and pieces that we think you’ll enjoy. And, of course, if you are off photographing festivals this year, this prize could come in rather handy!

For your chance to win the Festival fun pack, just email ask@tpoty.com and let us know the festival you would most like to photograph one day (or the best one you’ve photographed so far), and why it’s so special. The winner will be chosen on May 16th. Good luck!

TPOTY judge Colin Finlay is always one of the people that visitors to Travel Photography Live! want to speak to. With his background in imaging and in photography competitions, he has a huge amount of expertise, and his presentations and imaging critique sessions at the the event always sell out. Here, in the first of a series of interviews with him, we ask some of those all-important questions about entering competitions.

Tell us about your background in photography competitions
I used to run the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition for the joint owners, the Natural History Museum and BBC. WPY is one of the longest established and most prestigious photo competitions in the world, attracting a huge number of entries from professional and amateur photographers around the world. I have been involved with Travel Photographer of the Year almost since the beginning of the competition and am often asked to work with other competitions such as the London Festival of Photography, the Terry O’Neill Award, The Google Photography Prize and The Panda Awards.

Why do people enter competitions?
Well, people should enter competitions for fun and for the opportunity for their work to be seen by influential people in the world of photography. However, usually the more prestigious the competition, the more people want to win, as winning a significant competition can have life-changing consequences. The downside of this is that “winning” takes over from “enjoyment” and in some cases leads people to try and bend the rules of a competition to increase their chances. Fortunately, the vast majority of people who enter competitions do so perfectly honestly but the very few who do try to win by subterfuge emphasizes the need for experienced judges who are more likely to detect something awry.

What should people consider when deciding which competitions to enter?
See who the judges are. Do you want your work to be seen by these people? Good competitions attract good judges who know how to fairly and objectively judge photo competitions. I get asked to judge many competitions but decline more than I accept. For example, in 2012, I only did three – Travel Photographer of the Year, the London Festival of Photography and The Google Photography Prize. I will only lend my name to bona fide competitions where photographers are treated equitably and whose organisers deliver on what they promise. The other benefit to anyone who enters a competition is that experienced judges have seen hundreds of thousands of images over the years and so can quickly spot something original and interesting. Judges with little experience tend to get excited about images that may be mundane to more experienced judges. So even if you do well in a competition with less experienced judges, it is a bit of a hollow victory as it is unlikely to advance your career.

Should they double check about copyright?
Absolutely. It is reasonable to allow the organisers to use winning images in the context of publicising the competition to potential entrants and sponsors, but that is as far as it should go. Too many competitions are set up to give a free source of imagery to the organisers and sponsors. So always be wary of competitions organised by travel companies, hotel chains, magazines, institutions, etc. And don’t get fooled by big name sponsors. They don’t necessarily mean to mislead, but often simply do not understand the implications of copyright. Photographers should always retain copyright to their images. I will only judge competitions where the photographers’ copyright is protected by the organisers.

Once someone has decided to enter a competition, what are the most important things they need to remember?
Always read the rules. So many good images get thrown out of competitions on technicalities. Do not assume that because one competition has a certain set of rules then others will be the same. Do not assume that because you have entered a competition one year that the rules will be exactly the same the following year. They may not be. Good competitions evolve. If in doubt, contact the organisers well in advance of the closing date to seek clarification, but never argue with organisers about rules, They are not going to change tham just because you don’t like them!

In major competitions, technical excellence is more or less taken for granted, so concentrate on originality. By knowing who the judges are and doing a bit of research, you can get a fairly good idea of what they individually like to see and the style that interests them. For example, some judges prefer a documentary style, others more conceptual imagery, others great portraits.

How can entrants do their best to make sure their images are what the judges want to see?
Assuming that you have read the rules and that you have entered your images in the right category, enter images that are original, creative and will stand out from the crowd. Bear in mind that the most difficult part of the competition is getting through the first round, especially if it is judged online, as judges will literally look at your images for just a few seconds. Judges will spend more time considering each image in each subsequent round and are more likely to pick up on the subtleties.

Is it a good idea to check previous winning images in a contest and submit shots like that – after all, the judges clearly liked them before?
This never works! First of all, it may not be the same set of judges, but even if it is, judges have a low boredom threshold and rarely go for the same thing twice. If you look back over several years of well established competitions, you will invariably see a great variety of successful images. Indeed, if you do not, then it shows that the competition is moribund and not going anywhere. After all, photo competitions should advance the art of photography and communicate changing tastes and styles to a wider audience.

Would you advise somebody to submit lots and lots of images, or to edit carefully?
It is often said that photographers are the worst people to edit their own images and this is generally true. The photographer has an emotional attachment to an image and therefore can not be objective in a way that a judge can be. It may have been an emotional moment when you took your first picture of a whale or a sunset, but never forget that in all probability many other photographers would have been to the same place before and taken a similar shot. Of course, you may think that your shot is better, but that is for the judges to decide. If you look at the best professional photographers, they tend to only enter very few images in to competitions, rather than enter the maximum number the rules permit. From a judging point of view, there is nothing worse than seeing similar images in a competition. It is a waste of everyone’s time and does not increase the photographer’s chance of winning. Another important point to remember is that usually new and fresh images do better than older ones in competitions. Great images can suffer from over exposure. It is a bit like getting fed up with a song that is repeatedly played on the radio. Just because your image has been on the front cover of a magazine doesn’t mean that it will necessarily win a photo competition!

Photography courses are like buses. You wait for ages for a good one to come along, then two come along at once. Award-winning photojournalist, author and documentary maker Nick Danziger and best-selling author Rory MacLean are running a creative workshop in Monaco this April 15th-19th, while 2010 Travel Photographer of the Year New Talent award winner Eric Kruszewski is leading a photography tour in Morocco in May. Continue Reading

Anka Sliwa’s image of a man walking past Ben Slow‘s striking wall painting ‘Screaming Faces’ in London’s Hanbury Street was a worthy winner of our First Shot category in TPOTY 2012. But what’s the story of this particular piece of street art? The artist puts us in the picture…

With my latest street piece, I returned to the wall on Hanbury street which I first painted around this time back in 2010. That piece was one of the first ‘proper’ street pieces I ever painted. It was of a Bengali mother and child and was chosen to relate to the local Bengali community who thankfully embraced the piece. I felt that with this next piece, I wanted to challenge people (and myself) a little more.

This time I wanted to deal with something at the complete opposite end of the spectrum but still very much related to the local community. I had a very clear idea of what this piece was meant to represent when I started it, and to be honest, I thought it would be very obvious from the outset. However, I was shocked (and also delighted) with the variety of responses and reactions I received.

My idea behind the painting was to show two characters as different sides of the same evil. On the left you have a portrait of a member of the EDL (The English Defence League) and on the other, that of an Islamic extremist. I have been very interested by such characters for a while. As a portrait painter I found them interesting in terms of the expressions and shapes, but as a human being, I always struggle with the stories behind such portraits and the fact that they are captured out of such hatred and contempt for another human being.

My point is simply that these two people represent the same thing – that of intolerance, racism and hatred. A very unfortunate but very real side of society that has become far too apparent of late. They see those who do not conform to their views as the enemy, and they preach hatred. They project themselves as different from the other but to the majority of people they represent the exact same thing.

I thought I would have trouble getting this painting done. I think it would be fair to say that Iunder-estimated the tolerance of people. Except for a couple of snide comments, I received nothing but positive responses. The majority of people completely understood what I was trying to say and backed what I was doing. Most people, whatever ethnicity or nationality they may be, have no time for the types of people I was painting and I cannot tell you how happy it made me to hear this. The beautiful thing is that that these extreme individuals are a minority and long may it stay that way!

As with the majority of my street work now, it is important for me to say something with what I am painting, be that representing someone I admire or appreciate, or in this case highlighting a particular point. As much as I am a painter, I am also a massive fan of street art, but I feel that not enough artists are using their privileged platform to full effect. I am all for stuff that looks great and is aesthetically pleasing, but for me it is also important to say something once in a while, get people thinking rather than simply admiring the beauty of something.

Other examples of Ben’s work appear below, and you can see even more – and learn more about this artist – at www.slowbenart.com

C.A.L.M. is a charity set up to help tackle the issue of suicide amongst men in the UK.The campaign against living miserably (CALM) was set up to help reduce the high suicide rate amongst men under 35, currently the single biggest killer of young men in the UK.Men are three times more at risk of suicide than young women – in 2010 75% of suicides were men. But while smoking and knife crime make the headlines, suicide is the biggest killer. I was instantly attracted to the charity due to my own issues with mental health and I am very keen to do whatever I can to help highlight the issue of mental health.Here you have the very honest, dead eyes juxtaposed with the inner pain. Here it is physically expressed, though unfortunately most people do not feel comfortable enough to express such feelings. It is mostly kept pent up inside. If it comes out at all then it is in private.

Ruth First was a journalist, academic and a gifted and dedicated political activist. She authored several books including “117 days,” the account of her imprisonment under apartheid’s 90 day law, and “The Barrel of a Gun,” her book about coups in Africa. She also edited a number of books, including Nelson Mandela’s “No Easy Walk to Freedom.” She was married to Joe Slovo who became the Housing Minister in Mandela’s government. On 17 August 1982, Ruth First was murdered by order of Craig Williamson, a major in the South African Police, when she opened a letter bomb made by Jerry Raven and sent to her university. The Truth and Reconciliation Committee granted amnesty to both Williamson and Raven. I painted this large mural of Ruth First in Nomzamo Park informal settlement in Orlando East, Soweto. Starting on National Heritage day, the 12 foot tall painting was completed in five days using ink and brush and spray paint.

Gillian Slovo, novellist and playwright and Ruth First’s daughter, when asked for her comment about the painting replied: “How wonderful that this painting of Ruth, based on a photo which was her mother’s favourite, should be there amongst a community she cared so deeply about.” Beauty Mlakalaka the owner of the small house on which the painting appears said “I think it is beautiful. Also people must know who this person was and what she did.”

The Young Photographers’ Alliance is holding its group show, “Home”: YPA Mentoring 2012, in a free-to view exhibition at London’s Margaret Street Gallery from January 8th-17th 2013.

The Young Photographers’ Alliance (YPA) charity was created to nurture young photographic talent, helping photographers aged between 18 and 29 to develop both the technical skills and business acumen required to build successful and sustainable careers. YPA has a free membership programme that offers young photographers industry standards information, discounts, and advice from leading photographers, art buyers, picture editors, and creatives. The YPA Members’ Area includes 28 short advice videos, with top photographers offering tips on everything from getting started to quoting.

Image copyright: Simon Goldstein

“Home”: YPA Mentoring 2012 showcases the images from this year’s YPA Mentoring Programme. The Mentoring Programme links emerging artists with established photographers and picture editors/ art buyers, teaching the mentees how to work to a brief while honing their technical skills and creative approach. The small teams of young photographers are collectively assigned a common brief and they are given two months to deliver their final projects. The mentors meet regularly with their teams, offering support and guidance from the initial conceptual stage through to the final editing process.

The theme for the 2012 Mentoring Programme was “Home”. In the UK, YPA hosted teams in Bristol, Glasgow, and London (a Commercial and an Editorial team). The mentors included Sophie Chapman-Andrews (Head Art Buyer at McCann London), Sophie Batterbury (Picture Editor of Independent on Sunday), Jasmine Teer (Visit Britain Photography Manager), leading photographers, Justin Sutcliffe, Daniel Bosworth and Claire Stewart, and freelance picture editors Elaine Livingstone, Liz Helman, and Debbie Ireland. The British Mentoring Programme ran in conjunction with the charity’s North American scheme, creating 18 teams across the US, Britain, and Asia.

Image copyright: Sarah Amy Fishlock

“Home”: YPA Mentoring 2012 features one image from each of the UK mentees and a small selection of pictures from the US and Thai teams. Sarah Amy Fishlock won the “Best in Show” award (sponsored by Adobe UK and Metro Imaging) for her “Ahren” series. The “Best Single Image” award (sponsored by Adobe UK and Bowens) went to Lucinda Grange for her “Notre Dame” image.

Describing her experience as a mentor for the London Commercial team, Sophie Chapman-Andrews says, “It was an absolute privilege to be a mentor for the YPA programme this year. I was touched by the passion and talent of all the mentees we worked with and it was a pleasure to see how they developed on their chosen projects over the course of the summer. I would say it was one of the most rewarding things I have ever done.”

“Home”: YPA Mentoring 2012 will be showing at the Margaret Street Gallery, 63 Margaret Street, London, W1W 8SW, until the 17th of January 2013. Margaret Street Gallery is an independent gallery founded in April 2012. In the heart of Fitzrovia, central London, the gallery specialises in the photographic and moving image. The gallery supports established photographers – such as Dorothy Bohm, co-founder of The Photographers’ Gallery, and actively promotes the emerging and new talents – such as Yaakov Israel, who was recently awarded the Descubrimientos PHotoEspaña 2012.

Congratulations to all the winners of this year’s Travel Photographer of the Year awards!

From our overall winner – recipient of the inaugural Cutty Sark Award, Craig Easton – to our 10-year old Young TPOTY 14 and under winner, professional and amateur photographers from 22 countries scooped individual TPOTY awards or special mentions this year. The prize-winning entries across the categories make a glorious display that showcases the beauty and diversity of travel imagery; fascinating glimpses of different cultures, gritty, thought-provoking documentary shots showing the darker side of life, abstracts, engaging portraits, cityscapes, and simply stunning landscapes and wildlife images.

The judging panel – which included photographers Eamonn McCabe, Jason Hawkes, Ami Vitale, Steve Bloom, Nick Meers and Chris Weston, and the editors of Hotshoe International, FOTO magazin (Germany), Outdoor Photography and the photography director of Condé Nast Traveller – had a wonderful and challenging time assessing the thousands and thousands of images. But we feel they’ve chosen an incredible selection of winning images, like this fantastic shot by Timothy Allen, which won Best Single Image in the People Watching category.